WINE TALK

WINE TALK; Vintage Service For Vintage Wines At the Ritz in Paris

By FRANK J. PRIAL

Published: April 24, 1991

PARIS—
IT happens. Even at the Ritz. Fellow bursts into the dining room with noisy entourage. Take-charge type. Open shirt, gold chains, Vuarnet shades. Orders for everybody, including the wine. Very expensive wine.

The wine is poor. Everyone is watching. He makes a face -- and sends it back.

Georges Lepre, the Ritz's chief sommelier, leans back in his chair and smiles. "We know that trick here," he said. "It usually happens when the sommelier is young, too insecure. They rarely try that with one of our experienced men.

"The idea is to convey a sense of authority."

Mr. Lepre knows something about authority. He has been a wine steward for more than 25 years, the last seven of them as head sommelier at the Ritz Hotel. Here, he commands a wine team unequaled anywhere. There are six sommeliers besides himself in l'Espadon, the hotel's main dining room, and 25 sommeliers d'etages -- room-service wine stewards.

There are five cavistes -- cellar workers -- who wrestle with cases and truckloads, and 10 cafetiers, who have nothing to do with coffee. They are the men, mostly young, who fill each wine order as it arrives from the restaurants, bars and room-service sommeliers throughout the hotel.

"The rule is six minutes," Mr. Lepre said. "Six minutes from the time a guest places an order until the bottle is opened for him and served. Anywhere in the hotel."

In the old days, that would have required much climbing of back stairs, cuffs on the ear and vile French imprecations to inspire the cafetiers. Now there is a beep and the order, a three-digit number, appears on a computer screen somewhere in the lower depths of the hotel.

The cafetier on duty springs to the wine cellar next door, one of three in the hotel, and snatches up the appropriate bottle. Flicking a bit of un-Ritz-like dust off the label, he zips the bottle aloft on a nifty little stainless-steel dumbwaiter, all in a matter of seconds. In an ice bucket if necessary.

There are three wine cellars because there is so much wine. Actually, there are four, including one outside the hotel. The biggest, a warehouse on the Left Bank, holds about 100,000 bottles. There are 20,000 more bottles in the hotel; single bottles in the cave du jour (the one with the dumbwaiter), which is replenished twice a day, and two larger cellars, one for each wing of the hotel.

"It seems like an enormous amount of wine," Mr. Lepre said, "but we sell 80,000 bottles a year, so we have a rather fast turnover.

Inventory is no problem; every transaction, from the warehouse to the table, is tracked by the computer.

"We know from hour to hour what we have, what we need and what people are drinking," Mr. Lepre said.

What people drink at the Ritz is red Bordeaux -- 8 of every 10 bottles sold. The rest is white Burgundy and a little Rhone wine, and, of course, Champagne. No one drinks American wine because there is none.

"The whole world comes to the Ritz to savor the best of France," Mr. Lepre said. "It's only logical to drink French wine. American wine? Maybe in eight years or so."

At least, his is an informed chauvinism. In 1983, after 20 years as wine steward at the three-star Grand Vefour Restaurant in the Palais Royal here, Mr. Lepre moved to Pasadena, Calif., to run the dining room at a place called La Couronne. "Corton-Charlemagne after six martinis," he said, shaking his head in disbelief. "I left after six months."

La Couronne, no, but California, yes. In small doses. Mr. Lepre returns every summer to judge California wines at the Los Angeles County Fair, to visit wineries and to savor the laid-back life.

At the Ritz, the heaviest wine action is not in the public dining rooms. "The most expensive wines are always served at private parties," Mr. Lepre said. If Robert Redford or Zubin Mehta or a Saudi businessman is in the hotel, they often prefer to dine and entertain in the private suites, away from gawking tourists -- and the competition.

And that is where the most exclusive wines, the Petrus and Lafite-Rothschild, flow. And the Mouton and the Montrachet and the Romanee-Conti. Where the room may cost $1,000 a night, the cost of the wine presumably is not too burdensome.

Which is just as well. A 1961 first growth Bordeaux, like Chateau Margaux or Latour, can cost $2,000 or more, and there is no wine in the house much under $40.

Are there "in" wines at the Ritz? "Very definitely," Mr. Lepre said. "Chateau Haut-Marbuzet is very hot, along with Chateau Sociando-Mallet and Montbrison," he said.

"And then Haute-Conseillante, in Lalande de Pomerol. John Fairchild helped make that one. After he tried it here, he wrote it up in M and W magazines and it's done extremely well." Lalande de Pomerol is a little Bordeaux commune about 25 miles east of downtown Bordeaux.

Getting a little-known wine on the Ritz list is almost impossible. Even famous names have to prove themselves every year.

"We didn't buy 1986 or 1987 Burgundy," Mr. Lepre said. "In 1988, we selected 1,000 names. By tasting, we cut that to 120. After we retasted them here at the hotel, 15 names made our list."

Mr. Lepre goes to Bordeaux every spring to taste -- and usually buy -- the newest vintage.

"If it's a good year, you have to make up your mind very fast," he said, "because of the speculators."